Guided
tours can be taken round the third and last built (below) of the
large blockhouses built by the Germans during World War 2 to protect
the U-boats operating from Lorient.

(Keroman
3 viewed from Port Louis)

(Keroman
3 viewed from Kernevel)

The
base was subsequently used by the French Navybut
is now used largely for light industry much of it sailing and
boating related. Driving through the old base one passes the first
two blockhouses (Keroman 1 & 2 completed in 1941, below) and can
view the track system used to move the submarines out of the water
and into the onshore blockhouse pens - an old French submarine, the Flore,
(Daphné class, 890 tons, built 1958-67 (see link
for details) - similar in size to the Class VII U-boats) is
displayed in the transporter cradle. The covered slipway of Keroman 1
is on the left hand side of the photo above and served Keroman 1 and 2.

Keroman
1 covered slipway lock

Keroman
1 & 2
with the submarine Flore between

Submarines
could be removed from the water and placed in a blockhouse pen in
under one hour.

Keroman
2 with track and cradle system between the blockhouses

The
tour starts inside Keroman 3 (completed 1943) with a walk along the
submarine pens to the far end of the blockhouse. Unlike the other
blockhouses Keroman 3 is a series of water docks.

The
two pens at the far end (above and below) were used for maintenance
and could be emptied as dry docks. The remaining five pens were
open to the water, the central pen could hold three boats while the
others accommodated two each.

Keroman
3
maintenance docks

Signs
on the dock walls mark the berthing stop points for the French
Navy's Daphné and Agosta boats. The base was not used for
nuclear boats.

One
pen shows some evidence of bombing during the war - a ripple in the
roof (above). The bombing was unsuccessful and the reasons for this
become clear in the next part of the tour climbing the stairs to the
roof of the building.

The
roof's layered design with spaces between the layers of re-inforced
concrete was very successful in withstanding and dissipating bomb
blast effects (above, the space under the roof). The tour goes out on
to the roof to one of the (now unoccupied) anti-aircraft gun
positions from where there is a very good view of Lorient, Larmor
Plage and Port Louis. One can see the buildings in Kernevel (Larmor
Plage, pictured below centre) occupied by Admiral Doenitz, the
commander of the German submarine forces, as his Headquarters (until
1942 when the HQ moved to Paris for security reasons after the Allied
Dieppe raid).

View
from Keroman 3
of Lamor Plage

Villa
Kerillon or the "Chateau des Sardines", Admiral Doenitz's
Headquarters, with the Villa Margaret to the right

There
is also a view from the roof of the two original Dom (or Cathedral)
bunkers (below - looking rather like today's hardened aircraft
shelters) built in the early stages of the war behind the fishing
port to protect submarines in maintenance. Submarines were removed
from the water via the slipway (centre) to be placed in these bunkers
or onto open (unprotected) hardstanding areas. A detailed view can be
seen on this link
[click "index", then scroll down and click
"Sleepway"] giving a 360 degree view round the slipway,
turntable and bunkers.

The
base was named after the war in memory of Ingénieur
Général Stosskopf, a French Officer from Alsace, who
was executed by the Germans in 1944 for assisting the Allies with
information about the base.

For
further details on the operations of the base during the war see www.uboatwar.net